Russia’s Yandex has been the second-most popular search engine in the world in 2024, according to Cloudflare’s annual report on internet trends and patterns. Global internet traffic has seen significant growth in 2024, rising by over 17% throughout the year, the report also stated.
In its 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review, the US-based software company ranked companies and services across several categories based on their market share and usage. For example, Open Ai has remained the most popular company in the field of artificial intelligence, while Binance continues to be the top cryptocurrency platform.
Google has also retained its position as the most popular internet service across all platforms, completely dominating the search engine market with an 88% market share.
Russian-based Yandex, meanwhile, was estimated to account for some 3.1% of the overall market share worldwide across all platforms, compared to the Chinese Baidu’s 2.7%, Microsoft Bing’s 2.6%, and DuckDuckGo’s 0.9%.
Yandex’s browser was also noted in the report, coming in as the third-most popular web browser on Android with a share of 1.4%. Google Chrome proved to be the leader among browsers on all platforms, accounting for 65.8% of the market.
Also this year, Pavel Durov’s Telegram became the third-most-popular messenger worldwide, trailing only Meta’s WhatsApp and Tencent’s QQ and beating out the likes of Viber and WeChat.
The ongoing rise in popularity of Russian-developed tech products comes after the mass exodus of Western tech firms from Russia due to Washington’s sanctions on Moscow following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.
Since many Western internet services have become essentially unavailable in the country, many Russians have turned to domestic solutions such as Yandex for their browser and internet search needs, VK as an alternative to Facebook, which has been banned outright in Russia, and RuTube as an alternative to YouTube.